120

FISH AND GAME.

FISH AND GAME.

? Continued. )

Yhe Fishing Industries of Ceylon.

BY

[AMES HORNELL, Marine Biologist to the Ceylon Government.

LE fisheries of Ceylon at the present day are
carried on, in the main, according to the
primitive methods prescribed by the custom of
oygone centuries ; the trammels of the caste
system do much to limit development. Little
has yet been done to organize methods, to
introduce improvements in the conduct of existing industries,
 or, until recently, to enlist the help of those scientific
methods of control and culture which have proved so
conspicuously successful in the United States in the
improvement of old and in the creation of new fishing
industries.
. Yet, in spite of this absolute conservatism, the fisheries of
the Island furnish very great supplies of excellent fish.
Over seventy-four thousand of the population depend thereon
for their livelihood. The great majority of the fishermen
are Roman Catholies, especially among the Sinhalese. Comparatively
 few Buddhists of the Fisher caste follow this
avocation now, but in the North and East a not inconsiderable
 number of Hindu Tamils and of Moormen (Island-born
Mohammedans) are engaged in sea fishing and in pearl and
chank diving.
Sea Fishing.—Within certain limits much ingenuity is
displayed in the devising of nets and traps and in their
manufacture, but everything is of the past—stereotyped and
become immutable. Nothing in the way of dredges or
trawls has been evolved ; the lines and nets at present
employed are similar to those in use generations ago. We
find villagers of to-day capturing fish in precisely the same
way as was described and figured in the middle of the
seventeenth century by Robert Knox, an English sailor held
captive for many years by the Kandyan king of that period.